A little over a month ago, at the tail end of the holiday break, boxes and I got together with some friends and played Machi Koro; first the base game and then the fully expanded "Bright Lights, Big City" version.

I'll probably never play either game ever again, and so that first night's impression of the game will probably be my enduring opinion of it. I experienced the game in very much the same way I experience a movie; it took about two and half hours of my corporeal time, stuck in my head for another day and a half or so, and was then summarily filed away; taking a place in my mental storage alongside dozens and dozens of other games I'd tried at friends houses, board game cafes, or conventions and only ever gotten a couple of hours out of.

I'm... somewhat uncomfortable with this. It is in many ways the standard in the "golden age of board games" but it doesn't feel quite right to me. I generally feel that iteration is a massive part of gaming. Iteration in design and iteration in play. At the end of the day the games I truly love are one that have been worked over for year and year (and yeaaaars) by designers in order to achieve the ideal rulesets and pieces and that been played again and again (and agaiiiin) by my peers and I to achieve the ideal play approach.

After reaching a peak in my first years in uni I think I've played a smaller variety of board games year over year over year for basically the last decade. I'm pretty happy with that status quo. I like my MTG, my Settlers of Catan, my Mafia, my Trick-taking games, and my DnD. Novelty's great but I'm almost certainly going to have a better overall experience spending two hours with a classic I've played 200 times before to something more one-off. Again, iteration really makes the process for me.

With that groundwork laid, let me get to some content. We have threads to talk about Magic, Mafia, and DnD so there's only one real direction to go...

Appropriately modified to context, Settlers of Catan is the best board game in the world.Haters can choke

Catan is often recognized for it's mass casual appeal and its ability to act as a "gateway drug" into more involved Germans, but I'm not here to tell you that Catan is the best casual board game in the world. It's the best game full stop. I've played well upwards of 500 games of Settlers in my life, and I've played with dozens and dozens of people on their first outing. After both my 400th game and a friend's first we both wanted to play again. It's worth thinking about why.

Catan's casual appeal is due, in large part, to it's flawless technical execution. Catan has a concrete and easily understood goal, a rule set robust enough to cover every gameplay case but simple enough to be followed flawlessly in 95%+ of play sessions (do you have any idea how fucking rare that is?), constant meaningful interaction between more than three players with dimensions beyond pirate game bullshit, a straight-forward and easily applied catch-up feature which players understand on their first game ("robber goes on the leader"), natural inertia leading to predictable and palatable game lengths, consistent opportunity for surprise and blind-siding moments, strategic elements both accessible and esoteric, enjoyable technical execution, and resonant flavor which is universally grokable.

Catan is criticized by wanna be "hardcore" gamers for strategic shallowness and while it's true that the game has - in the end - no more than five viable strategies the decision of which to play is never trivial and players who "force" a path without putting effort into "finding their lane" give up huge chunks of win percentage whilst scoffing at how "easy" the game is. Moreover, masterful tactical execution in Catan - both on the technical level and the social level - is ridiculously difficult. You might be executing 80% correctly as doing so is relatively straightforward, part of the game's casual appeal. But 100%? Not a bloody chance. You're just too check out to see the 20 percentage points you're dropping.

Also, I built a cool tower with my tiny wooden pieces.
Don't shake the table.
Seriously.

~~~Although postsocratics like St. Augustine and Judith Butler explored a diverse set of ethical and metaphysical ideas, their unifying feature as a movement was a principled refusal to speculate upon which of the four elements the world was made out of.~~~

boxes is the best human and I am going to get her a kitten or 2 kittens